Tripwire

the written descriptions. He ordered a half-pounder, Swiss, rare, slaw and onion rings, and made a substantial wager with himself that it wouldn’t resemble the photograph in any way at all. Then he drank his ice water and got a refill before opening the folder.
    He concentrated on Victor’s letters to his folks. There were twenty-seven of them in total, thirteen from his training postings and fourteen from Vietnam. They bore out everything he’d heard from Ed Steven. Accurate grammar, accurate spelling, plain, terse phrasing. The same handwriting used by everybody educated in America between the twenties and the sixties, but with a backward slant. A left-handed person. None of the twenty-seven letters ran more than a few lines over the page. A dutiful person. A person who knew it was considered impolite to end a personal letter on the first page. A polite, dutiful, left-handed, dull, conventional, normal person, solidly educated, but no kind of a rocket scientist.
    The girl brought him the burger. It was adequate in itself, but very different from the gigantic feast depicted in the photograph on the menu. The slaw was floating in whitened vinegar in a crimped paper cup, and the onion rings were bloated and uniform, like small brown automobile tires. The Swiss was sliced so thin it was transparent, but it tasted like cheese.
    The photograph taken after the passing-out parade down at Rucker was harder to interpret. The focus was off, and the peak of his cap put Victor’s eyes into deep shadow. His shoulders were back, and his body was tense. Bursting with pride, or embarrassed by his mother? It was hard to tell. In the end, Reacher voted for pride, because of the mouth. It was a tight line, slightly down at the edges, the sort of mouth that needs firm control from the facial muscles to stop a huge joyful grin. This was a photograph of a guy at the absolute peak of his life so far. Every goal attained, every dream realized. Two weeks later, he was overseas. Reacher shuffled through the letters for the note from Mobile. It was written from a bunk, before sailing. Mailed by a company clerk in Alabama. Sober phrases, a page and a quarter. Emotions tightly checked. It communicated nothing at all.
    He paid the check and left the girl a two-dollar tip for being so cheerful. Would she have written home a page-and-a-quarter of tight-assed nothingness the day she was sailing off to war? No, but she would never sail off to war. Victor’s helicopter went down maybe seven years before she was born, and Vietnam was just something she had suffered through in eleventh-grade history class.
    It was way too early to head straight back to Wall Street. Jodie had said seven o’clock. At least two hours to kill, minimum. He slid into the Taurus and put the air on high to blow the heat away. Then he flattened the Hertz map on the stiff leather of the folder and traced a route away from Brighton. He could take Route 9 south to the Bear Mountain Parkway, the Bear east to the Taconic, the Taconic south to the Sprain, and the Sprain would dump him out on the Bronx River Parkway. That road would take him straight down to the Botanical Gardens, which was a place he had never been, and a place he was pretty keen to visit.
    MARILYN GOT TO her lunch a little after three o’clock. She had checked the cleaning crew’s work before she let them leave, and they had done a perfect job. They had used a steam-cleaner on the hall rug, not because it was dirty, but because it was the best way of raising up the dents in the pile left by the credenza’s feet. The steam swelled the wool fibers, and after a thorough vacuuming nobody was ever going to know a heavy piece of furniture had once rested there.
    She took a long shower and wiped out the stall with a kitchen towel to leave the tiling dry and shiny. She combed her hair and left it to air-dry. She knew the June humidity would put a slight curl in it. Then she got dressed, which involved one garment only. She put on Chester’s favorite thing, a dark pink silk sheath which worked best with nothing on underneath. It came just above the knee, and although it wasn’t exactly tight, it clung in all the right places, as if it had been made for her, which in fact it had been, although Chester wasn’t aware of that. He thought it was just a lucky off-the-peg accident. She was happy to let him think that, not because of the money, but because it felt a little, well, brazen to admit to having such a sexy